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Here’s a secret: I think Whisper can be used in some interesting ways by news organizations

When Neetzan Zimmerman, the king of viral content at Gawker Media, left to join the anonymous-sharing app Whisper, I have to confess that I wasn’t really that interested — at least from a journalistic point of view. Like its competitor Secret, I assumed that Whisper was just a collection of banal personal confessions and pseudo-insider info from Silicon Valley. But as I’ve watched as Whisper has continued to sign partnership deals with a number of media companies such as BuzzFeed and Fusion, I’ve come to believe there might actually be something worthwhile there.

One of the things that caught my eye was the uptick in Whisper usage in Iraq after the authorities there locked down Facebook and Twitter, in the aftermath of attacks by the militant group ISIS — which appears to be a fairly sophisticated user of social media. According to Zimmerman there was a spike in activity on…